When I broke blog silence while on vacation to post about the Apple/NECC podcast project, I knew I wouldn't have time to listen in. I'm slowly getting caught up on the podcasts, and they're freaking excellent!
I listened to Bernie Dodge's session yesterday, and Barnaby Wasson's podcast-about-podcasting session this morning (with Jason's entertaining intro). I'll be listening to Cole's breakfast session on the way home this afternoon.
Since I've been a total maniac IT Conversations Fanboyâ„¢ since it went live, I'm sort of addicted to almost-live conference audio streams via podcasts.
I can only hope the conference organizers get past the "But... if we podcast it, who will come to the conference?" paranoia and just start sharing this stuff - every conference should be podcasting its sessions.
EDUCAUSE gets it, big time, and has been podcasting the hell out of their recent gatherings. NorthernVoice got it big time, too. We failed to do NMC2005 justice, and WWDC2005 is so übersecretive that podcasters would be executed.
Worst case scenario, a couple people who were sitting on the fence trying to decide if they should attend might be able to save some travel funds. Best case scenario, you get a dynamic community of contributing members growing around your field of study.
In the same way that a website without RSS is lame, in a year or so, conferences without podcasts will be lame.